'Boy' Who Cried Wolf Too Often!

Here’s a classic case of a ‘boy’ who cried wolf once too often.

President Bush, in revealing an aborted suicide-bombing flight on the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles some 4 years ago, including the information about wannabe kamikaze Malaysian pilot Zaini Zakaria, has disgusted the American people with his usual tactic of using fear to marshal them over to his side. He has overdrawn on their trust, and no longer enjoys credibility.

As I mentioned in my posting Malaysian Wannabe Kamikaze Pilot - 2nd 9/11? there is a hugh difference between a wannabe kamikaze pilot and a kamikaze pilot. I mentioned that President Bush was exaggerating on the sensational to justify his illegal wire-tapping on his own citizens. The Americans agreed with my conclusion.

Weiss, a Los Angeles City Council member said:

"Let's call this what it was. President Bush is digging out of an extraordinarily large political hole ..... He's trying to build support for the NSA [National Security Agency] wiretapping programme and so, to build that support, he dusts off details that are at best three years old, at worst closer to four years old. It's just part of his constant speechifying, to impress upon people what he's doing in the war on terror."

Hmmm, I’ve learned something new today – the term ‘speechifying’. Somehow it fits President Bush to a T. The frank meaning is ‘verbose bullshitting’.

Anyway, the problem with President Bush’s fear tactic is that his Administration’s actions haven’t matched his revelation of the threat of terrorism. The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t made the appropriate security funding to say, California if such a threat had been true. The majority of the funding had gone to States that are pro Republican Party, somewhat like the Malaysian funding for our States.

Weiss said he could have understood the President's announcement if he had followed it with a pledge of a few extra millions for Los Angeles' counter-terrorism operations, but alas, nada! Weiss sarcastically criticised President Bush for not getting ‘that part of the equation’ correct.

In fact California is one of the high security threat areas because more than 50% of the shipping containers bound for the USA go through the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, yet till today those ports still haven’t obtained the required number of scanning machines. If another terrorist attack occurs in California, say with a 'dirty' bomb in one of those containers, it will be another Hurricane Katrina episode, showcasing the Bush Administration’s bumbling incompetent management of security and disaster.

The New Zealand Herald also revealed additional information, that by soem starnge coincident, the President’s right-hand man, Karl Rove, made a speech to Republicans 2 weeks ago, that the Republican Party’s mid-term election strategy would employ the tactic of presenting Bush and his party as the only reliable guardian of the country's safety and security.

The Republican Party had recently used this fear tactic when Karl Rove was investigated for complicity in the Valerie Plume affair, over the scandalous and deliberate leaking of an undercover CIA operative's name just because the CIA operative’s husband refused to support Bush’s lies about Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger.

When that investigation was hot after Rove, the Administration issued a warning about a threat to New York’s subway system, which turned out to be erroneous.

But like the boy who had cried wolf, no one now bothers to listen.